Dorset Museums 11- Dorchester County Museum

The next time you pay for that ice cream with an old bent pfennig and congratulate yourself on having got one over that simple Dorset pedlar, think again... especially when those old knee pains, back pains, eye pains, ear pains, you name it pains suddenly reappear.

Sticking pins in wax effigies is well known and though not confined to Dorset serves as a warning never to mess with the locals.
Thomas Hardy records it in his novel the 'The Return of the Native'
'From her workbasket in the window seat the woman took a paper of pins. These she began to thrust into the image in all directions, with apparently excruciating energy. Probably as many as fifty were thus inserted, some into the head of the wax model, some into the shoulders, some into the trunk, some upwards through the soles of the feet, till the figure was completely permeated with pins'